Open Letter text
We, the undersigned, offer our support for these statements:
We are committed to the dignity and worth of every natural human person. Technology should serve humanity and contribute to the common good, enhancing human freedom and protecting the vulnerable. The intelligence of artificial systems does not confer on them equality of moral worth with humans, much less divine-like status. While anthropomorphism can be useful, we should guard against misrepresenting artificial systems as if they were humans.
We are conscious that our creativity is both a gift and a responsibility, and that the tools we form in turn form us, including our cognition and moral reasoning.
We celebrate the ways AI can aid understanding, improve well-being, democratise opportunity, enhance creativity, support efficiency, and empower humanity in our shared vocation to develop knowledge, advance human flourishing, and enrich culture.
We observe that AI can offer pathways towards or away from knowledge of reality. We believe that design choices around data and algorithms involve implicit and explicit moral and ethical decisions, noting especially the issues of truthfulness and transparency.
We recognise a responsibility to sustain and care for the natural world, and to avoid forms of development that impose reckless or irreversible harm.
We regret the ways AI has been used to erode attention, confuse understanding of reality, misuse data, displace dignified work, and contribute to new burdens in societies and the natural world.
We recognise that work on AI techniques, systems, and products requires the ongoing exercise of judgement for technical choices made amid uncertainty, with limited information and agency. It also requires judgement about how we present to others the choices we make, and the impact of those choices on the nature, imperfections, biases, influences, and limits of AI systems. Our judgements in these matters have consequences for humanity, and we commit to giving serious attention to the moral reasoning these judgements require.
When faced with a conflict between conscience and the demands of our profession, we will exercise wisdom in giving voice to conscience. We acknowledge the reality of wide variation in individual agency to effect change or speak out.